with a ‘blowhard (trump-eter)’ clown, pat oleszko wins whitney biennial’s bucksbaum award
five decades of artistic mischief and inflatable absurdity
Pat Oleszko has received the Whitney Museum’s 2026 Bucksbaum Award, a $100,000 prize presented during each Biennial year to an artist whose work is judged to hold lasting significance for American art. Selected from 56 artists and collectives in Whitney Biennial 2026, the Detroit-born, New York-based artist becomes the thirteenth recipient since the award began in 2000.
The announcement places new attention on a practice Oleszko has built across more than five decades, using handmade forms and performance to give political satire a loud, physically comic body.
Inside the Biennial, Oleszko occupies the gallery with two works separated by sixteen years and a drastic shift in scale.
Blow Hard (1995) is a vast inflatable clown head whose trumpet sends a sculpted flame across the room, originally commissioned for the World Trade Center Plaza. Footsi (1979), screened nearby in black and white, follows two fingers dressed in tiny socks and shoes as they wander across the artist’s body and through New York.
One work turns fabric and air into architecture; the other turns a hand into a miniature performer.
portrait of Pat Oleszko at Whitney Biennial Opening Night, March 3rd, 2026 | photo by Darian DiCianno/BFA.com © BFA 2026, courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art (header image © David Peter Francis)
FROM WEARABLE SCULPTURE TO PUBLIC INTERVENTION
Across more than five decades, Pat Oleszko’s practice has slipped freely between object and action. Her costumes extend the body into bulbous, comic forms, while the inflatables become sets that performers can enter and activate.
Film gives those gestures a smaller frame, and public interventions bring them into streets or civic spaces where an audience can become part of the joke. Craft stays visible throughout, from padded seams and painted surfaces to the slightly unruly behavior of air-filled forms.
That humor has given the artist a way into subjects that could otherwise become heavy in the gallery. Her work has addressed feminism and consumer culture, along with nationalism and ecological collapse, yet the critique arrives through puns and costume, often pushed by absurd shifts in scale.
Whitney director Scott Rothkopf described her as ‘a singular force in American art,’ while Biennial co-curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer pointed to the response from fellow artists, many of whom saw her career as a model of artistic freedom.
installation view of Pat Oleszko, Blowhard, 1995 and Footsi, 1979 at the Whitney Biennial 2026 | photo by Ron Amstutz, courtesy the Whitney museum of American Art
A LONG CAREER ENTERS THE WHITNEY’S AWARD HISTORY
The Bucksbaum Award was established by collector and Whitney trustee Melva Bucksbaum in 2000 and is funded through an endowment from the Martin Bucksbaum Family Foundation. Given during each Biennial cycle, it recognizes one participating artist based on both the work on view and the broader arc of their career.
Oleszko follows 2024 recipient Nikita Gale and joins a lineage that reaches back to Paul Pfeiffer, the award’s first laureate.
For Oleszko, the award arrives after years of working across museums and public space while holding onto the handmade strangeness that defines her work. The Whitney installation gives that history a vivid compression. A clown head swells toward the ceiling while a pair of fingers strolls through the city.
Together, these two works condense a career built on turning jokes into physical encounters, now recognized with one of the museum’s most significant honors. Whitney Biennial 2026 remains on view in New York until August 23rd, 2026.
installation view of Whitney Biennial 2026 (Whitney Museum of American Art, March 8th –August 2026). Pat Oleszko, Blowhard (Trump-eter), 1995. 2025 | photograph by FIlip Wolak
project info:
artist: Pat Oleszko
award: 2026 Bucksbaum Award
presented by: Whitney Museum of American Art | @whitneymuseum
biennial: Whitney Biennial 2026
curators: Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer
works on view: Blow Hard (1995) and Footsi (1979)
dates: March 8th — August 23rd, 2026
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